Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of a current article from Retail Paradox, RSR Research's weekly analysis on emerging issues facing retailers, presented here for discussion.
CRM (customer relationship management) has long been a bad word in retail, ever since some retailers spent millions trying to implement it in the late '90s and early half of the '00s. But if CRM Evolution, held in Manhattan in mid-August, is any indicator, the CRM solution space is undergoing a massive change.
The biggest impact is due to social media. At first glance it would seem like I'm talking something gimmicky - social business for social's sake. But sales is a relationship-driven process, and solutions need to conform to and embrace that necessity. Retail is no different. But more work needs to be done to develop a real understanding of the sales process in every relevant department, from store floor to contact center.
It will help to keep in mind a very broad definition of what constitutes "social" in an enterprise context today - everything from corporate blogs to videos to internal Twitter- or chatter-like activity feeds.
On the retail sales floor, social in clienteling will be about comment streams or ratings and reviews by employees that they share internally with each other, or perhaps to build stronger relationships with their customers. It's about leveraging the entire employee base to get help, rather than the limited resources of the local store or store manager. It promises to help make every employee as smart as your smartest employee.
Employee expectations around tools are also changing as more and more entry-level sales positions are staffed by Gen Y and beyond. One presenter at CRM Evolution talked about how they had "gamified" their sales process to encourage employees to use the system - providing weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly rewards based on social recognition - to the employees who helped others out the most or posted the most valuable content.
Having probably already been trained by games as diverse as Farmville and WoW, future sale staffs will bring the expectations that those games set at home into the workplace - which means that retailers need to provide a way for employees to connect with each other - especially beyond the boundaries of the store. Provide social recognition within that context for people who are positive contributors to the community. Give them goals and update them - in real-time - on how close they are to achieving those goals. And make those goals progressive, so that there's a new one every day or every week. And finally, change the incentives over time to keep them interesting.
CRM isn't what it used to be. It's not even CRM 2.0 any longer - it's really on the way to CRM 3.0. Hopefully retail will have a better idea of how to use it this time around - the customer experience is likely going to depend on it.